Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video] | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

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We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale".

A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1].

Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT to allow for situations in which a limited amount of energy could be expended to either increase the hashrate further or to get closer to the limits of computation [2].

Edit 2: the more I think about it, the more it reminds me of the Universal Paperclips game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

There is a unit named after Nakamoto [1] referring to decentralization, adding another might get confusing.

[1] https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

This is basically what all life does.

Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself.

Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.

Comparing life itself to crypto is ridiculous.

Not entirely. Energy utilization is a common proxy for technological development. If a society is plowing tons of energy into crypto mining, then by definition somebody is getting utility out of it. (Which doesn't preclude it all being a Ponzi scheme, but that's another story.)

Life, the original RNA Ponzi scheme.

Makes you wonder if there are any other RNA Ponzi schemes in the universe.

Isn't crypto ridiculous too? Rai stones look objectively more sensible and they are ridiculous.

I'm not saying the technology is ridiculous, I'm just saying the overall implementation and outcomes would look like a madness to someone from the past or indeed the future.

Rai stones are less weird than they look once you learn that some super expensive art is held in freeport warehouses and stays there even when bought and sold to different owners. Valuing a painting you own but never see at millions of dollars that gets bought and sold to others who never see it isn’t that much different than saying a certain immobile Rai stone is worth X of Y.

Cryptocurrency is more ridiculous than both of the above, imo. Rai stones can be used as material, art can be looked at and enjoyed, cryptocurrency is random numbers controlling access to a ledger.

absolutely. as the far west was incredibly ridiculous. this is not a cryptocurrency issue, that is humans being humans

It's not, unless you think that e.g. cyanobacteria causing the Great Oxidation Event were somehow objectively more useful than cryptocurrencies.

Mind you the Great Oxidation Event wiped good chunk of life back then.

Mainly because oxygen was toxic to anaerobic life and it also oxidized methane making Earth into a snowball.

"Use" is always in relation to an someone's or something's end. Without knowing what the relevant ones are, the comparison fails.

For all us, uh, air breathing mammals, yes, the great oxidation event was a great deal more useful, objectively, than cryptocurrencies.

The main point is that this hunger for resources without regard for consequences is the very core of life.

We did not exist back then. And cyanobacteria did not have a great plan of creating mammals.

Note that I qualified my statement. I didn't say that the great oxygenation event was objectively useful to the moon, I said it was objectively more useful to air breathing mammals than running difficult computations to control write access to a ledger.

The random waste from cryptocurrencies just turns into heat, so I expect it opens up ~zero new possibilities. Have fun though!

How would you even define 'more usefull' in this context?

How is cryptocurrency waste heat different from bank server waste heat? Only because crypto has a dramatically worse efficiency? I guess both my crypto wallet and my bank account are products of waste heat that produce zero new possibilities.

The comparison was to oxygen.

And then I'm separately making the claim that using proof of work won't set the stage for anything interesting in the future, no matter how much heat it generates.

From the outside view of an alien observer, is there any difference to us plastering mars with solar panels for crypto mining vs plastering mars with suburban developments? Would we, had we a powerful telescope pointed at a neighbouring solar system, be able to tell the difference?

Can I be clear you cannot find a clear distinction between a made up currency and places where humans live?

I can, but I'm a human. My point was: Can an outsider discern it? If they can, would they put much meaning to it?

What? Are you saying that whether aliens can make a distinction is an important part of a decision making framework?

Not really.

Life transforms matter and energy into increasing structure and complexity.

A classic pathological life-like process is the paperclip maximizer.

The paperclip maximizer transforms matter and energy into a regular structure of low complexity.

Crypto is one step worse than the paperclip maximizer. It converts matter and energy into pseudo-random numbers.

The only structure discernible within the randomness is the mechanism that induces organic lifeforms to work on behalf of crypto.

Hear hear, can I get an amen for Komolgorov?

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C... https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...

Now let's clippyfy the universe:

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index.html

Arthur C. Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God

"overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

> Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

I'm sorry I didn't understand this. Could you explain?

You need to read the short story referenced above to understand the context.

The parent postulates that a "Nakamoto" type 2 civilization will convert all the energy of its star into heat doing bitcoin calculations. Such a star would disappear from visual light (Dyson sphere stuff). The Clarke story is about a religion that uses a computer to calculate all the names of god, bringing about the end of the universe. The story ends with stars disappearing. Both have big computers doing math that results in stars disappearing from the sky.

The joke is that rather than calculating the names of god, maybe we will end the universe by finally getting to the end of bitcoin calculations.

Ahah. Someone should write "BTC respects the second law of thermodynamics"

> Someone should write "BTC respects the second law of thermodynamics"

Knut Svanholm: https://medium.com/hackernoon/bitcoin-and-thermodynamics-63f...

Andy Poelstra: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf

I am curious how long after renewable energy displaces conventional methods combined with the predicted big reduction in pricing before heat becomes the next pollution bogey.

the cheaper it gets will just increase its use which for much of the world is a great improvement in quality of life but there is always some costs involved

Renewable energy is heat-neutral, at least the solar/wind types. The electricity is created from heat. Energy in photons that would otherwise strike the planet and become heat is turned into electrical power. In converting fast moving air to slower moving air a wind turbine extracts heat from the atmosphere and turns it into electricity. So now matter how many turbines and solar panels we build, they aren't pumping out any net heat.

I believe this holds true for hydro, but not so for geothermal as it moves net heat into the biosphere.

Can we please start regulating crypto currency mining? This is insane. I think it needs to be global mining regulation. Can the UN do anything else? If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency. Not ok. I know this is controversial but we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.

The entire purpose of cryptocurrencies that they and their economies cannot be regulated by any government. A regulated cryptocurrency is just fiat with more steps and a contradiction in terms.

What about mining? We regulate gold / silver mining. Why not crypto mining? It consumes more energy than the gold or silver mining industries. https://coincentral.com/bitcoin-mining-trumps-gold-mining-en...

That's not going to stop organized crime or states that want to leverage influence over Bitcoin. Regulating the mining of physical materials is easier because governments can directly control the mines and regulate shipping and industries, etc. But even then, mining is full of cartels, slavery and blood money.

Unfortunately, I think the only thing that's going to stop Bitcoin mining is the laws of physics.

You regulate the fiat onroads.

If miners cannot sell their coins, they can't pay the electricity bills.

Bitcoin will always be around, but with sufficient fiat blockages the value plummets.

Governments should announce that people will have a year to sell all their coins (the price will tank immediately anyway), and then buying and selling of PoW coins will be banned.

If you think "lack of electricity" is going to stop bitcoin mining, you are mistaken. You are just hoping for doom on an asset you don't understand or don't like, it's just not a good way to argue against something.

Do you have any reason to feel so despondent without any real evidence? There's already plenty of people mining with renewable/stranded energy sources, all mining will head this way. My prediction is that the "energy consumption" arguments against bitcoin will disappear in 5 years.

People are gonna tell us (bitcoiners) that the USD is secured by the powerful military of US behind it and we're supposed to accept it as a positive, but if we say that we're going to use electricity to secure the network with nothing but math and computation, we're instantly hated by the same people. What gives?

How can you be ok with wars and threats of violence to enforce the value of a currency, but not computation and electricity? I just don't understand it.

Think about it like this new energy capacity is added that is sustainable but the cryptocurrency mining part of grid keeps consuming and eating more of the grid then newly added renewable capacity it would be a wash and we wouldn't achieve sustainability commitments and be able to mitigate climate change. You can't just say well if Bitcoin mining is renewable then we are ok. What about the rest of the grid? They need some of the newly added renewable capacity as well as growth continues. TLDR if new renewable capacity added is less than growth of mining and current use of mining we get no where.

* You are talking as if there is a linear scaling of how much energy is consumed by a "miner" on the fly. This is false.

* Most renewable/stranded energy mining operations have their own energy source that is not going to be shared by someone else.

* Bitcoin's energy consumption doesn't scale with the number of transactions on each block.

* Most of the bitcoin has already been mined, the incentive to "mine aggressively" is decreasing over time.

* "What if bitcoin uses all the energy", like the top poster on this thread was talking about, they were mocking it to say that all of the energy generated by the sun will be used for mining eventually, is this a fair argument? If such extremist thinking took hold, we could use it to subdue pretty much all progress. Did we think that there will be gold miners digging up land everywhere and we won't have a place to live?

Most of the arguments against, sound like the same arguments against things like cars (vs horses). "Do you think we'll make all those roads just for cars to go on?", "Cars don't work on dirt roads, they get stuck all the time", "What if you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere?" "You will run over people and kill them in an accident" "Cars cause pollution"

Making ones own arguments is a great idea. Mocking others is not. Re-read the site rules.

"Rules for thee, but not for me"

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435464

2. "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I simply pointed them out politely. Any sneering was entirely projected!

Bitcoin energy consumption is rising as mining is more competitive and more rewards with rising price. The consumption of bitcoin mining is increasing. Can you stay calm? I am not trying to say lets give up on cryptocurrencies I am saying we need to have serious conversations about energy consumption and controlling mining energy consumption. When people get really defensive and angry it doesn't help.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

I am calm, don't patronize me.

look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440168

They straight up want destruction, without even considering merits of the new technology.

People think if you are for controlling energy consumption and regulation of cryptocurrency mining you are against cryptocurrencies themselves. That is false.

To argue with statements like this: "If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency." just sounds disingenuous, it seems like they haven't done any research whatsoever, they just woke up to this news and got outraged.

The energy consumption in clothes dryers, transportation, christmas lights etc. all will fall under "more than most countries" category. You are just constructing a narrative based attack.

You are trying to brush off criticism with a red herring. The US military doesn’t secure USD... and we need to have a conversation about energy consumption and Bitcoin. We need to regulate mining for it the same way we regulate other mining on the planet. Physical or digital or still uses energy and we need to have a conversation and look at options. Not just dismiss critics for pointing out the obvious.

> The US military doesn’t secure USD

The dollar is literally backed by the extraction and sale of oil (for dollars), which itself is enforced by the largest consumer of oil in the world, the U.S. military, and they secure the trade routes with their aircraft carriers and subs. It's called the petrodollar for a reason.

I'm not dismissing criticism, I'm just questioning your line of criticism. Everyone will accept a fair regulatory regime, many of you are calling for an outright banishment, that's unacceptable.

I would like to ask you why start with cryptocurrencies, that only account for 0.6% of world energy consumption, when we can dream big and tackle the issue once and for all by banning air travel. BOOM! In a heartbeat you are consuming -20% of world energy. Or why don't we ban actual mining? Another 10% plus reduction of unspeakable crimes perpetrated daily on vulnerable people.

Why cryptocurrencies of all the energy hungry sectors? There are way lower hanging fruits than crypto.

The difference is that air travel is at least useful.

Why don’t you start looking into how much energy is consumed by worthless things like christmas lights.

> we have to at least debate this subject as we face an existential threat from climate change and yes cryptocurrencies are contributing to the climate crisis.

Are you Kim Stanley Robinson? If you aren't you'll enjoy his latest novel "Ministry for the Future", which follows the line you describe and posits a post-apocalyptic future with less machine labour and more manual labour, abandonment of air travel, no meat consumption by humans, a solar array covering much of India, etc. He then proposes replacing Proof of Work with Proof of Carbon Sequestration.

---

Aside: MftF is, to me, an appalling unscientific low effort bit of propaganda (at least for the first 60 chapters) but perhaps there is a way to steelman KSR's theses.

Love "Universal Paperclips"--'completed' it multiple times in one session. It's the core game without the fluff, uselessness at its best. You've been warned:

[0] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

I've never heard of Abkhazia before, so I had to look it up. It's a partially recognized state, part of Georgia [0].

There's even been a war in 1992-1993, after the collapse of the USSR [1].

Sometimes I'm still surprised of my ignorance about important facts that happened during my lifetime.

Anyway, the next question for me was: why is electricity so cheap there, and should I assume it's cheap 24/7, and therefore generated with hydro?

Electricity is largely supplied by the Inguri hydroelectric power station located on the Inguri River between Abkhazia and Georgia

there's even a study on Electricty consumption, if you really want to dig deeper into it. [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Abkhazia_(1992%E2%80%93...

[2]: http://iccn.ge/files/energy_study_results_abkhazia_2019_eng_...

People are pretty poor there, and Russia supports them a lot (you can have russian passport if you live there). I assume most infrastructure is supported using russian help. It is logical Russia does not want her money spent by miners, who are probably not even from Abkhazia.

Abkhazia is a Georgian territory occupied by Russia. Russia is the #1 reason for poverty in the region.

I'm in no way supporter of Putins regime and I totally agree that he'll do everything to keep all countries around poor and unstable, but come on. Original war in Abkhazia happened when USSR crashed and it was your usual ethnic conflict. Not some orchestrated hybrid war like in Ukraine, but real civil war. I've been in both Abkhazia and Georgia and people of both countries relise that and count themself the righteous side.

Yeah it's obvious that Russian establishment have all reason sto keep this conflict unresolved as it's prevent Gerogia from joining NATO or EU. But even if regime in Russia gonna change there is no easy solution because ethnic conflict didn't go anywhere.

Yeah no, that's not quite the full story. Abkhasian regime persists largely due to continued presence of Russian troops. Much of the residual economy in the break-off region revolves around the Russian bases as well. The rest of it is the lowest tier Russian "visa free" tourism, also guaranteed by Russian military presence.

Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds.

> Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds.

You mean "history" in a sense that the local population would be ethnically cleansed from the Georgian majority and the ones that survive relocated to Russia? And then they would be marked as aggressors because they dared to try protecting themselves with arms, and refused to just disappear from the territory where they have been living for centuries.

Yeah, we saw that many times, and the only criteria that leads to the "correct" conclusion who is right and who is wrong, who is aggressor and who defends himself, who is the victim and who is villain is whether US/NATO or Russian/Other troops are involved on one of the sides.

No, I mean they would continue to live on the territory they lived for centuries (somehow without apparently being ethnically cleansed by Georgians all that damn time). And without Russian involvement it would have long since went into participatory politics.

And it's not just a speculation, there was a perfect A/B test. Ajaria, another autonomous region of Georgia, long since had independence ambitions too. However that conflict fizzed out without notable violence.

The difference from Ossetia? It does not border Russia and there weren't substantial troops stationed at the time of USSR dissolution.

There is Russia and then Russians there running things. They have different goals. If Abkhazia is anything like I think it is...you just pay someone up and you can do whatever you want. That includes stealing electricity, or killing someone.

"Now I'm in power so it's my chance to grab something" is the mentality in a lot of countries.

*virtually all of countries.

Funny enough, the name immediately jumped out to me because of video games ;)

The free map coming with the DCS World flight simulator is a large part of the eastern Black Sea and western Caucasus, and there's quite a few missions and campaigns in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions (some with a heavy Russian narrative, some from Georgian and NATO point of view, so all in all quite balanced I'd say). Having never heard of Abkhazia and Ossetia before either this lead me to read up on their (mostly troubled) history.

Who says video games aren't educational.

I've been there during my urbex days.

Frozen conflict zone, not unlike Transnistria, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh. The border is militarized, except the Georgian side which doesn't seem to consider Abkhazia a threat. Lots of abandoned infrastructure because the native Georgian population was killed and/or fleed, and hasn't been harnessed for some reason. Abkhaz cross the border daily to buy basic stuff from Georgia. Only approved vehicles can cross, so most people do it walking with "taxi drivers" servicing both sides of the border. Most of the foreigners there are Russians looking for a cheap seaside vacation. There are streets named after Shamil Basayev (!).

Actually I left Abkhazia illegally, since you have to collect the visa inside (as there aren't diplomatic missions anywhere) after crossing the border, and the offices were closed all 3 days that my visa was going to be valid for. So yeah, arguing with soldiers for 4 hours in my rudimentary Russian wasn't great.

Border crossing: https://i.imgur.com/dFMnwsJ.jpg

They made me delete the picture but LPT: keep the SD card aside for the rest of the trip, then run an undelete tool on it.

AMA.

Is this the Abhazian side? The bridge not far from Zugdidi?

You see the Abkhazian side (pic taken from the Georgian side). Exactly that bridge! Have you been around there?

Yes, back in '95. Fun times.

> They made me delete the picture but LPT: keep the SD card aside for the rest of the trip, then run an undelete tool on it.

Undeleting photos from an SD card saved data for me once. Just shut it off once you've noticed you messed up, and don't touch it. Thank goodness for FAT32.

SD cards should be pretty easy to hide as well, unless they do X-rays on your shoes and the like I guess?

Could put a micro SD card in a SIM card slot in your phone maybe.

True. But if you check the picture carefully, you will see a soldier spotting me with binoculars :)

Many Android phones have a slot for either SIM+SD or a double SIM, so yes

Eh, the problem with practicing amateur spycraft is that then you look like a spy if anyone notices.

Sure, maybe they're extremely unlikely to find an SD card in your shoe -- extremely! -- but if someone does find an SD card in your shoe, they're going to want to know why.

Just leave it in your pocket and dump it in the X-ray bin with the rest of your pocket trash. It's unlikely anyone will notice, and if they do, you're just a tourist with an SD card for your camera. Maybe they throw it away, maybe they copy it, but it's unlikely to end with you spending four hours being questioned about why it was in your shoe.

It's worth noting that the Georgian majority population was ethnically cleansed (with >5000 civilians killed) from Abkhazia by separatists, with full support and encouragement of Russia[0]. The preeminent Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, later responsible for Beslan school siege and other attacks, took part in this war on the Abkhaz side, after being trained for the purpose by the GRU (Russian military intelligence of the Salisbury/Novichok fame)[1]. I guess they kind of lost control of him afterwards, oops.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Georgians_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamil_Basayev

Yeah, it was crazy. The fact that it was the majority meant loads of stuff would stay empty/unused, which remains true even today. I have footage from a massive seaside resort in the center of the capital [0] to give people an idea.

Unfortunately, there are always two sides to every story, and both sides were pretty nasty to each other[1]. But agree, it's hard to side with Basayev on this war, or any other really.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSi88CLRuZE

[1] http://www.unpo.org/downloads/AbkGeo1992Report.pdf

Electricity is free for them, because Georgia considers it's as part of Georgia. Abkhazia right now is local mafia-run region by Russian occupant forces (Russia actually has military bases there).

Nothing is going on there economically, it is slow decaying society so their only income is mining operations like this.

It's a beautiful place. Stalin used to have a house there.

If it weren't for its current situation, it would be a great destination for tourists.

From a quick glance at the video looks like they're illegally tapping power from the grid, and got shut down.

I didn't know about it either until I read:

- Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

It has a lot of fun stuff about how the Abkhazia communist party and their interaction with the main party in Moscow. A lot of interesting history.

The speaker doesn’t mention any blackouts, she only describes how they shut down few illegal crypto farms (only 230 units of unspecified model or power consumption).

I believe there is more to the story and that doesn’t mean that there is no blackouts, but for completeness sake this video is incoherent with this thread’s headline. Blackouts may be caused by e.g. shitty, cheap, unmaintainable grid, or by local corruption that feeds from these farms and doesn’t officially demand higher loads from energy providers to cover the difference. My (completely subjective) opinion is that not taking it at the face value is a pretty safe move. (Disclosure: russian, non pro-crypto guy)

That’s true, they didn’t mention blackouts in this particular video, but that’s one of the reasons they have been doing this for more than a year.

There are a lot of articles in Russian on this subject.

In English: https://www.rferl.org/a/bitcoin-blackouts-russian-cryptocurr...

Electricity there is very cheap (ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 US cents per kWh).

The government has closed around 300 mining facilities in order to reduce energy shortages.

There are tens of such videos on the Youtube channel.

Instead of trying to remove the symptoms, the government should focus on increasing their peoples productivity to put them in a position to pay higher electricity prices

No, the Government should petition bigger Governments to regulate (/ban) what is clearly a waste of Earth's and Humanity's resources.

Are you talking about capitalism in general or just some specific activity?

I am talking about Proof-of-Work being attached to an 'asset' of astronomical value.

Governments should ban the transaction of PoW cryptocurrencies on environmental grounds, in addition to the misallocation of computer chips.

Bitcoin without PoW has no value. It's the entire reason it works. Without expending a finite resource to produce another, you can't constrain a money supply nor prevent it from attacks.

Governments would be unwise to ban a voluntary system for the same reason they don't ban any other uses of energy that people question the value of (there are plenty). In any case, it will not stop, only move. If not to another massive farm in a favorable jurisdiction (that could be captured) then to smaller sections where it is unidentifiable.

There are many things governments rightfully ban for ecological reasons (e.g. energy inefficient house building, inefficient light bulbs, single-use plastic, blast fishing, many forms of waste disposal). Just because Bitcoin happens on the computer should not exempt it from that.

Well then if we must choose between planet, and greaseballs, we'll choose the planet any day.

> Bitcoin without PoW has no value

Exactly. It’s broken by design. Let’s get rid of it ASAP and instead focus on blockchains that may have value without the horrible incentives of PoW.

We shouldn’t keep Bitcoin alive just because it was the first successful attempt. That has been tried, it’s now clear it’s not sustainable over the long-term. We should learn the lesson and move on to a better approach.

> It’s broken by design.

it's genius by design. so far nothing other than PoW was shown to work.

> We shouldn’t keep Bitcoin alive just because it was the first successful attempt.

you're not keeping it alive, it exists in a free market and there is demand for it.

> That has been tried, it’s now clear it’s not sustainable over the long-term.

not clear at all. so far looks like it's the most sustainable system of decentralized value storage and transfer compared to all others.

>> That has been tried, it’s now clear it’s not sustainable over the long-term.

> not clear at all.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

So sustainable...

Yeah. It really is.

> Without expending a finite resource to produce another, you can't constrain a money supply nor prevent it from attacks.

Correct, but it doesn’t have to be energy intensive. Bitcoin /could/ move to proof of stake, technically.

If bitcoin is so bad why not let the free market tank it eventually?

Because the free market isn't great at finding solutions that incorporate externalities, especially not quickly.

externalities in this case are caused by energy producers, not consumers.

Hacker news both advocates for nuclear while targeting bitcoin because of energy consumption, that's quite a dichotomy right there.

You can't do that in a country where $200 is considered a very good monthly salary.

This seems like the wrong approach. I don't see how closing large-scale mining facilities will suddenly solve the problem.

As long as the energy remains cheap, mining will just move underground. I could see miners offering ordinary villagers kickbacks to "host" a few miners on their premises as to conceal the energy consumption behind what appears to be legitimate usage.

Laundering significant amounts of energy usage is nontrivial. Underground mining will be an order of magnitude smaller in scale.

What is the alternative? Raise energy costs for people who may not be able to afford it because of of a few abusers?

raise the price by tiers. A person can only use so much, but mining btc has infinite appetite. The price of electricity should reflect the cost, and subsidies should only be targeted at limited cases.

I'm curious why electricity is so cheap there. If it's caused by subsidies, the alternative is obviously replacing the subsidies by income transfers. If it's not caused by subsidies, there must be a better way to profit from their competitive advantage of being able to produce electricity cheaper than anyone else in the world.

Unenforced, uncollected bills. Also many mining ops just steal electricity. Why can folks get away with it? Because it's a failed state.

You cannot move "underground" when you are sucking that much power.

The government did what they should have done, and what all governments should have done a long time ago and shut this nonsense down. It's sucking up resources and only adding to wealth inequality.

Bitcoin rewarded a small group of very smart people very very very well. It then rewarded morons... hordes and hordes of morons very very well too. We will be living with the consequence of this for decades to come.

You can move underground. Put a PC in regular homes with a few GPU's, kick back some money for the people letting you do it, and the energy is dissipated across dozens of regular homes. Sure, it would be a lot of work. But it's certainly worth it given the very cheap energy.

> It then rewarded morons... hordes and hordes of morons very very well too.

You can just say you are jealous rather than belittling people like this.

The electricity there isnt just cheap, it's virtually free. They just dont shut you off it you don't pay.

In some parts of Italy it's 0.042 USD/kWh (so I assume it's much cheaper there)

Idea to solve the crypto energy problem - sell space heaters as dual purpose crypto miners. People need space heaters. They buy them, but they also mine crypto (as a free byproduct of the space heating). The number of crypto mining space heaters out there dilute the value of dedicated mining so much that people don't bother with it anymore. Even buying the space heater to make money from mining crypto doesn't make that much money - due to the fact that so many space heaters are crypto miners. Problem solved?

Edit/Multi-Reply: Heat pumps are efficient, but they don't replace all practical use cases for a space heater.

people do that, but it's not an efficient way to heat. The most efficient heaters pump heat from somewhere else, even when the source has a lower temperature, like the way a fridge pumps heat from inside the cold fridge to the air in your house. (my apologies for assuming you live in a house if you are actually a 12 dimensional entity that lives on a space whale)

Heat pumps are approximately three times as efficient as electric heating.

That needs good insulation first, or am I missing something? Usually space heaters are warmer, but less efficient. Heat pumps are great if you have time to warm up the space but if it's insulated like an open field, you'll be always cold.

Why wouldn't one insulate the space? Heating is no end in itself.

Heat pump is essentially a "reverse mount of a refrigerator", putting heat in and throwing cold out. In the worst case, the pump will degrade into a heating element, only outputting heat from electricity (which is what a regular electric heater does).

Insulation is not a requirement, but will lower your energy needs to keep a steady temperature.

They also don't provide very much heat output when it's cold outside

It needs to be really cold. Like -15°C and some go as low as -40°C. They degrade in efficiency but are still better than a space heater. In the worst case they are exactly as efficient as a space heater.

Sure, but at the point where the efficiency is sufficiently poor, why not run a Bitcoin miner instead of the heat-pump-turned-space-heater?

As I understand most heat pumps in cold climates are usually installed with "backup heat" sources for this reason.

A mining rig that runs only a few days per year when the outside temperature is too low sounds very inefficient. This is the same problem that the plan to store excess renewable energy by producing hydrogen has. If you have the hardware, you would want to have it running as much as possible.

worst case being 0 K outdoor temperature?

Rather 1:1 electricity to heat conversion.

"Pumping water down hill is more efficient than pumping it sideways"

The CoP of a heat pump is dependent on the temperature potential across the heat pump. Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house: the very scenario your post suggests they should be used.

Heat pumps are great for increasing thermal potentials and moving heat across them (not for sourcing energy). They're also great for balancing an internal thermal state that is, on-net, in balance (think of a large office building in the morning, one side is being heated by the sun, the other side is frigid -- heat pumps can balance the internal energy demands instead of simultaneously cooling one part of the building and heating the other)

Heat pumps list that temperature in the documentation of the unit.

I think most of the midwest figured this out during the recent cold snap. It turns out the cut off for my heat pump is 10F.

I'm in the process of finalizing the installation of a wood stove insert to provide backup heating during the cold months. Switching to all electric feels a little like burning cash to me.

If you're in the US, there is an incredible 26% tax credit available on stoves (wood and pellet) that are more than 75% efficient. This covers both the cost of the unit AND installation. It's good for about the next 2 years and went into effect in early Jan.

https://www.hpba.org/Advocacy/Biomass-Stove-Tax-Credit

> Caution to the reader who thinks one could pump heat from frigid external temperatures into their very warm, high temperature house

I heat my house with a heat pump. I live in Eastern Canada and we regularly have -20c days and I still heat my house to a comfortable level. Our pump is >=100% efficient all the way down to around -25c at which point it's less and less effective.

These pumps are extremely popular around here. We heat during the winter and cool during the summer with the same unit.

I consider our heat pumps to be our primary source of heat in our house. We only run the gas furnace if we get into sub -25c days which is not often, we had none this year.

There's a few companies that already do that, they rent out servers / processing power (probably via a spot market) which are in people's homes chooching along. The spot market will always be loaded because at some point one of the many cryptos will find it worthwhile.

What do you do with them in the summer? What about warmer climates where you don't need a heater?

The idea is there are enough people using space heaters on the planet at any given time to dilute any gain from dedicated crypto mining.

I live in an area of Canada where home heat is pretty much provided exclusively by natural gas but electricity comes mainly from nuclear and hydroelectric sources.

Interesting to think about, but by firing up a miner on my graphics card at off hours I'd probably lower my overall fossil fuel consumption and make some money on the side.

Anything I'm missing here?

With the current crypto prices I don't think you're missing anything. I think you're on to something.

plug a usb thermometer and write a script to throttle the hash rate when the temperature is high

This can't work because it just raises the efficiency of mining. That means mining will become cheaper. That means your reward is higher. That means you can mine more for the same money. That means every miner does that, increasing the part of the heat that's wasted.

In the end, the exact same amount will be 'wasted' as before.

Consumers that are already using (electric) space heaters are already paying $X/mo in electricity.

If they are getting value out of a bitcoin-mining space heater, it is justified to run at any time you want heat, because by getting a BTC rebate of any amount would make it cheaper to run than a space heater.

If enough miners are mining for the purpose of heat, it will push non-heat miners out of the market, because the heat-miners are rationally willing to mine at any price (any 'rebate' on expected electricity->heat costs is useful), whereas the non-heat miners can only rationally mine when btc reward exceeds electricity cost.

(We are a LOOONG way from the majority of miners using the heat, but just wanted to point out there is a hypothetical future where the market could eliminate heat-wasted mining)

Plague of our time. Same thing has been happening in other countries, e.g. Iran [1]. Blackouts, climate impact, electronic waste, etc.

1- https://www.coindesk.com/inside-irans-onslaught-on-bitcoin-m...

So now the developing world will start using their energy to mine BTC instead of manufacturing goods for us to consume. Will this ultimately cause inflation then? Because demand for goods will not be met?

This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results.

"This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results."

I completely agree. I don't pay attention to a lot (or any) online economic circles, but I'm astounded at the pushback of high profile economists (Krugman, et al) against the shear novelty of the moment for their discipline.

Regardless of whether or not someone "believes" in bitcoin, the reality of the times is that cryptocurrencies are creating fantastically interesting economic experiemnts right under our noses. This seems like it would be the dream come true for an economist from an observational/curiosity perspective

These “experiments” have real life consequences on ”subjects” who never agreed to be part of it.

We should maybe create a crypto-country where crypto-currencies fanatics are free to experiment all of this on themselves instead of all of us… (it’s a joke, please don’t create a crypto country!)

You need to have bigger ambitions. Let's turn the whole planet into a crypto experiment. We can change the name of the planet Earth to ... Crypton.

So you don't want to live with us, and you don't want to let us live separately.

Industry that needs lots of energy already locates in places with stable grids.

Yep, trillions of dollars got printed but BTC energy will cause inflation.

Typical case with russia occupied territories, no law, criminal business. They supply electricity to this region but locals just do not pay and do illegal connections. Mining business controlled by Russia-Abkhazian criminal clans and FSB-backed pseudogovernment structures, so this video is an episode of internal war between them.

EU regulates how much power my vacuum cleaner and my lightbulb can use. And to what end? So that some greedy miner can buy cheaper electricity to make numbers and heat! The only way I can see that the environmental problem called Bitcoin can end, is to make it a more expensive.

Power prices could be increased by usage to motivate consuming less and punish those who use too much.

There will still be countries that mine and burn coal so that others can mine Bitcoin. But I believe there are more sustainable industries that could benefit from these wasted resources

Isn't the real issue here one of incentives? BTC is of obvious criminal use in regards to laundering money and trading in blackmarket goods and services, but clearly there is a much broader appeal to more mainstream use as well. Activists, journalists, dissidents all need to have lines of cash and stores of value that cannot be taken down with one phone call to Chase bank.

For someone in a relatively free Western country, BTC looks like a ridiculous waste of energy. However, from the perspective of people hiding from political and state oppression BTC is a godsend. Refugees can safely and securely liquidate their assets before fleeing a country as one example. This gives them more freedom to choose where they want to re-locate to and allows them to use some saved wealth to get up and running faster once they find a new place to live.

On HN I get that this view on the matter will not be popular, but I think BTC and Proof of Work generally have attached something very much like a market price to the cost of state overreach. If governments had acted better, BTC would never have reach the height it is at today. It would still be a hobbyist curiosity with a substantial but fringe criminal interest.

Trillions of dollars get printed diluting your wealth and you have a problem with the hardest form of wealth known to man. I boldly predict that you or your progeny (depending on your age) will realize in 10 years that you should have bought BTC. I encourage you to research why non money launderers like Jack Dorsey, Elon etc. are buying BTC.

Look over here at the electricity use of Bitcoin peasant, not over there at what Wall St does to the world.

This is awesome. I just wish more governments would wake up to the fact that crypto does nothing beyond suck resources and warm the planet. If you want to bet on things that go up & down, there is the stock market where things go up and down 20%+ every single day.

Bitcoin has provided the non-boomer generations an investment vehicle and inflation harbor that has no competition. I know so many younger people who now have some semblance of retirement savings due to crypto. Fiscal policy and wealth inequality have made crypto the only option for savings in 2021.

I warned about this a few weeks ago, and people were skeptical. But sadly “in retrospect it is inevitable”. Where is the flaw?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220992

Let me refine my prediction to describe the transition period. Bitcoin will actually deepen inequality in the world, by robbing the third world countries of electricity first, and no one in first world countries will care. The politicians of the third world countries would be paid off similarly to how Nestle or CocaCola buys up lakes and pollutes them. And privately owned infrastructure and lakes will fall even faster.

The flaw is greed.

Okay but the question is, about the flaw in the argument that Bitcoin will increasingly cause blackouts in third world countries and poor towns?

It's not a flaw in the sense that your scenario is unrealistic. But people are not going to point at Bitcoin or undertake action. You can see that in the replies of the cryptobelievers here: BTC cannot do wrong.

To what degree is the Bitcoin problem here and to what degree the electrical grid?

How does the network protocol of bitcoin work?

Would governments be able to block it?

Can it be DDoS-ed?

Without knowing for sure, I think you could just block port 8333. The individual miners could surely be DDoS, if you know their IP.

I wonder if it's possible to just generate junk transactions and throw them at miners.

That would close things off for most nodes but there are lots of nodes running on Tor or custom ports. Not to mention other channels like satellites that are used for transaction distribution.

Junk transactions could stop a few nodes but all transactions are verified locally on nodes and won't be broadcast if they turn out to be junk.

You can probably fingerprint the protocol and block it, but then it will just turn into a game of cat and mouse.

They can't realistically block it. Normally the miners are trivial "structure in, best hash out" functions. The logic of choosing the transactions and preparing new blocks can be completely independent and distribute the work over any number of remote miners. (That's pretty much how mining pools work)

The network transport would be trivial to change, or tunnel over (for example) SSH.

DoS also wouldn't be likely - if you have power to do that and can identify the connection, you're likely to have access to the physical address.

Find where a lot of power is used. Go in with guns.

What's your expectation for how effective that would be? Let's compare some existing bans, say prohibited cannabis farming:

* Large energy use (lights, fans, pumps?)

* Very characteristic energy use (high, relatively invariant)

* Massive government budgets/surveillance to attack producers

* The need to move non negligible amounts of physical goods

* Moral campaigns by governments and social groups that it's bad for society

And yet the banned-market drug trade revenue is something on the order of 80 billion dollars per year or 220 million a year.

Bitcoin miners, currently:

* Large energy use (fans, HVAC, ASICs)

* Very characteristic energy use (high, relatively invariant)

* Mix of jurisdictions banning or allowing it.

* Only need about 2G / Shortwave radio worth of bandwidth to produce blocks

* Moral campaigns by governments and social groups that it's bad for society

Miner revenues need to be on the order of 10-50 million USD per year to sustain themselves. That's almost 10 times less than the failed (relatively global) "war on drugs"

Add to it that by defecting from national socialist forms of storing one's wealth, rather than just momentarily indulging in vice, one improves their position, I'd suspect your hypothetical ban won't work that well.

How many orders of magnitude more power do crypto miners require vs. cannabis farmers? I don't think you get to say they are equally 'large energy use'.

It's a custom unencrypted P2P network protocol. A government could detect someone using this protocol and block it. It technically can not be DDoS'd. Though if you were you could DDoS the bootstrap nodes and that would make it harder to join the network. If governments block communication it can cause the network to split making it unclear which "half" of the network is the real one. It would create a fork.

They can't. You only need around 1mb/minute bandwidth to be able to operate. Changing ports can be easily circumvented by using a proxy. It's much easier to detect the guy who is drawing all this electricity.

Governments can regulate at the edge:

- regulate electricity consumption

- regulate bank accepting crypto-related money

- regulate exchanges listing Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies, etc

This is why distributed exchanges and DeFi are important, as they eliminate the last two problems.

I wasn't listing problems but ways governments can regulate crypto-currencies even if the network itself is out of reach.

I'm myself in favor of cryptocurrencies (though, definitely not Bitcoin) AND for some level of regulation.

something size of a government could do a %51 attack on the whole network.

Yes, governments can take Bitcoin down: https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is...

You're asking this, in 2021?

> Would governments be able to block it?

Deep packet inspect the network, raid current users and miners, then degrade the network for a few months for everyone. After that, random enforcement. Incentivise by letting police privately seize Bitcoin from the populace.

The idea that a protocol is immune to state violence because it can be sneaky is absurd.

I think the slowness of BTC adoption and growth are its strength. Within a decade, BTC investors will reach the highest offices of decision making bodies, and will be wealthy enough to shape the future of policy

The slowness of BTC adoption and growth are its strength. Within a decade, BTC investors will reach the highest offices of decision making bodies, and will be wealthy enough to shape the future of policy. States bodies will adapt not compete, similar to how they've adapted to the internet.

I think some of the furor over bitcoin power usage is overblown. It's true, as crypto folks say, that the power is doing "something."

It's more that...a system where you will pay anyone who finds any cheap power source anywhere in the internet-connected world no matter how they get it is obviously going to have awful externalities. Even though most people will be reasonably ok about it, enough people we be shitty enough to turn any worldwide no-checks system into a hellscape.

Something = securing the network. Not with armies, but with math and computation.

Its not just power usage - GPUs are essentially unavailable due to Ethereum mining right now, which has broader societal implications given the limited fab capacity. So we have a giant misallocation of energy, and a giant misallocation of computer hardware.

Trolley-bus and tram companies in my Eastern European city are increasing fare pricing due to electricity price increases - how much of that is due to increased demand from mining?

The very real, and very negative, implications of PoW mining are becoming apparent.

I'm surprised the rich farmers of India (yes, the kind "protesting" recently) haven't started Bitcoin mining - electricity for agriculture is free in much of India (along with a lot more freebies, and no taxes). I guess it's mostly the intermittent state of the supply that's the problem.

Aren't those people struggling to buy food? How are they gonna afford an antminer?

India is intentionally keeping its people poor/starving with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_in_circulation#Total_... and https://www.businessinsider.com/india-malnutrition-a-story-o...

Please, I know you are all smart, think about this:

2009-2011: it is a stupid internet currency with no value

2012-2015: it is used for drugs and other crimes

2016-2018: it is for tax evaders, money launderers and terrorists

2019-2021: it is bad for the environment

I am starting to see a pattern here, don't you?

All of these things are true?

I've thought mining wasn't profitable anymore.

If your electricity is free, it's all profit after you pay for the hardware.

Crypto is the best financial system designed. Period.

Bitcoin is so inefficient that it is hilarious that people complaining about the environment also buy bitcoin. If you want to buy into crypto at least go for ethereal

Ethereum is as inefficient as Bitcoin, just at a slightly smaller scale.

It looks like the nft scene on ethereum is starting to migrate to tezos, because gas is cheap there and it is PoS since the beginning. I wonder how that would influece the ethereum commmunity.

Small migrations to other chains doesn’t affect the Ethereum community. Multiple cheap NFT solutions exist on Ethereum (such as Immutable X) that keep NFTs in the larger Ethereum ecosystem instead of isolating them on a less used chain.

Ethereum also uses Proof Of Work mining....

it's at least planning to switch over to proof of stake though

How's that going? Been hearing that it's happening "really soon now" for at least 3 years.

They actually started their path of getting required amount of ETH stacked. But it's can still take several years.

I'm running a PoS validator right now. It's been live for months.

Actual transactions will go through this very network in probably a year.

Moving forward, slowly but steadily. Vitalik been hinting that the work to get of PoW might speed up now, as PoW miners are not too happy about some proposed changes (they'll earn less fees soon, and in the future they will be unnecessary at all).

So, things take time. Who knew building a global decentralized computer for everyone was hard work, gonna be difficult and take long time?

(Side-note: no one has said that ETH 2.0 is "really soon now", at least not anyone who either works on it or watches the development closely. ETH 2.0 has been far away for a long time, and it's still not close to being deployed, so you might want to look for better sources for your information)

The wheels are in motion now. The first block was proposed on the proof-of-stake system on December 1st.

Large scale ETH miner here who uses excess hydro. ETH uses PoW, but the long term plan for ETH is to move to PoS.

I'm going to address one large difference between ETH PoW and Bitcoin PoW that people rarely talk about, which is the hardware differences.

ETH did something relatively smart and tried to peg the hardware to GPUs. This had the effect of ensuring that there would not be the same speed race wars that (imho) plague Bitcoin. Every new generation of hardware obsoletes the last. You don't need the fastest/latest GPUs to be ROI efficient.

The system isn't perfect, people have made ASICs, but it turns out (for now) that they aren't much more cost/speed efficient than just using GPUs due to the memory hardness of the ethash PoW algo.

As a result, the limited number of GPUs also limits the size of the growth of the network. They are also more difficult to setup and run at scale than Bitcoin ASICs. Finally, GPUs can go back to doing other things (gaming/ai/ml/rendering/...) and generally won't become e-waste.

PoS is never going to work. They have been delaying it for over 5 years now. There is no way to switch to a proof of stake system that has the same guarentees as proof of work.

On the other hand, most applications of ethereum don't need a blockchain or proof of work at all, since they are inherently vulnerable to attacks by centralized parties.

Instead consider PoS blockchains, such as Tezos, Cardano, etc.

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